by Nan Ryan
He continued to be a highly competent scout, knowledgeable and brave, but he was growing increasingly distant. To her. To the rest of the crew. He had little to say to anyone, answering questions with a distinct economy of words.
At times he was almost sullen. His dark moodiness was apparently so uncharacteristic that his two partners—men who had been with him for the past four years—seemed genuinely baffled. Further, she had noticed a brooding expression in the depths of West’s beautiful silver eyes on occasions when he thought no one was looking at him.
Puzzling over the enigmatic man, Elizabeth had begun to suspect that the impassive Quarternight was nursing some secret sorrow, some hidden wound. She recalled snatches of conversations she’d had with him. Remembered things he had said before their bantering relationship had so abruptly ended. Like the evening in the courtyard at Rancho Caballo when he’d said all the good boys had been killed in the war and that others had come home and nobody wanted them. She remembered, too, when she had asked if he had no heart at all, he had said he did and intended to keep it right where it was.
Before that night, when they were still riding the Rio Grande, she had said to him once, “Perhaps, Quarternight, your toughness and self-interest mask some shattered ideals.” A strange expression had flickered into his teasing gray eyes and she had anxiously pressed on, asking, “Was your trust in someone misplaced?”
“I have little faith in most men,” he had swiftly replied, “and none at all in women.”
At the time, she had paid little attention to the rather telling remark, but now as she thought back on it, she wondered if he had meant it. Or was she reading more into the offhand remark than it warranted?
Squinting now at the tall, long-legged man with his hands on his slim hips, booted feet apart, Elizabeth frowned, then mentally shook herself, feeling guilty and confused. What did she care what West Quarternight was thinking? What was it Grady had told her? No le hace.
It doesn’t matter after all.
By midafternoon the caravan was down out of the Oscuras and into the most awesomely ugly terrain imaginable. Blackened, lava-scorched earth stretched in all directions, the flatness of the desert floor scored and scarred with black basalt twists and peaks, thick, ropy cords and tall, jutting ridges of black volcanic stone.
Elizabeth thought that the stunningly grotesque region appeared as if the flat black earth had at one time been a vast kettle of black liquid cooking atop a huge stove. The thick, boiling concoction had bubbled hotly, leaving large, deep craters scattered over its black surface. At the same time it had spewed up great plumes of ebony fire, leaving trails of cliffs and ledges from the eruptions.
She wasn’t that far off the mark.
While she and Edmund stood staring at the burned, twisted lands in astonishment, Grady told them they were standing in the Valley of Fires. The blackened, twisted lava formations were formed from volcanic eruptions that had happened thousands of years before. He said the huge piles of black lava covered more than a hundred square miles.
Lifting a hand to shade her eyes, Elizabeth looked out at the vast blackened Valley of Fires in mute amazement. Pointing and gesturing, Grady moved forward. Taos and Edmund followed. Elizabeth didn’t move. She stayed where she was, rooted to the spot.
So engrossed was she by the stark, foreboding scenery, she didn’t notice the dark, foreboding man who silently stepped up beside her. Then she felt his presence. Close. At once, she could hardly breathe. It was his fault. He was making her miserable. He was making everyone miserable.
Suddenly Elizabeth was overwhelmingly angry with him. He had chased her mercilessly until he caught her and made swift, profane love to her. Now he treated her with cold contempt. As if what had happened between them had been all her fault. As if she were the one without morals!
Elizabeth dropped her hand away from her eyes, quickly turned, and snapped, “What is it? What do you want?”
His narrowed gaze never leaving the distant horizon, West calmly replied, “Not a thing. Nothing at all. And you?”
“Me? I don’t … I have everything … I … oh, damnation, is your only goal in life to cause trouble, Quarternight?”
At last he turned his head and his low-lidded eyes finally met hers. They were expressionless. He said, “Lady, I have but one goal. To escort you and Edmund to wherever the hell your loving husband is holed up, collect my money, and go.”
Stung by his harshness, Elizabeth said, “Quarternight, you truly are a cold bastard!”
“Sin duda,” he replied levelly. “Without doubt.”
Tension between the two became almost palpable as the expedition continued to wind its sure way toward the southeastern corner of the wild New Mexico Territory.
Determined to forget West Quarternight existed, Elizabeth went out of her way to ignore him and to appear gay and carefree. When the contingent reached the spectacular White Sands that Grady had been telling them about, Elizabeth paid no attention to West’s stern warning that everyone was to stay mounted, that they would waste no time on foolishness.
Had he not issued such a high-handed command, Elizabeth might have contented herself with staying in the saddle. As it was, she immediately felt obliged to take off her flat-crowned hat, hook it on the saddle horn, and climb down off the iron-gray stallion. Turning around and around, she soon fell to her knees and scooped up double handfuls of the white, sugary sand.
Laughing like a child, she played in the glistening sand, completely captivated by the vast shimmering wavelike dunes, as fresh and unspoiled as a wilderness snowfall. A vast ocean of sparkling gypsum crystals, as bright and as beautiful as fine diamonds. An unbelievably extraordinary place of almost blinding brightness.
Totally absorbed with the pristine beauty surrounding her, Elizabeth romped about on the dazzling white sands, oblivious to the men’s shouts of appreciative laughter at her childlike antics. Oblivious as well to the narrowed silver-gray eyes that followed her every move.
While the others in the caravan dismounted to stretch, West stayed in the saddle. With a knee hooked around the horn and a thin brown cigar clenched between his teeth, he stared unsmiling at the laughing, frolicking woman. When he saw her spin dizzily about, then fall giggling down onto the sand, a vein begin to pulse on his high forehead.
Elizabeth lay on her back, spreading her outstretched arms and legs enthusiastically, shouting to Edmund that she was making a sand angel, just the way she used to make angels in the snow. Her long, red hair had come unbound and was fanned out atop the white sands. Millions of tiny glistening crystals clung to her tight pants and her long-sleeved shirt. The sound of her girlish laughter echoed across the billowing dunes.
Growing angrier by the second, West felt every muscle in his body tighten. His sharp teeth clenched so tightly, his cigar was almost cut in two. He lowered his leg back over the horse, thrust his booted feet into the stirrups, wheeled the sorrel mare about, and shouted over his shoulder, “That’s enough, Mrs. Curtin. We’re moving out!”
West was equally disgruntled the next day when they reached the beginning foothills of the Sacramentos and Elizabeth insisted on leisurely stopping to study the fascinating petroglyphs decorating the huge rocks.
“What’s botherin’ you, Sonny?” Grady asked the scowling West. “It ain’t gonna make no difference if we spend a few minutes here. I been a-tellin’ the Curtins I’d show ’em the picture carvin’s.”
“Make it snappy,” West bit out irritably. He swung down out of the saddle and sat on an overturned boulder while Grady herded the others up into the rocks. Glorying in his role of knowledgeable guide, Grady told how the Anasazi—ancient ones—had carved the pictures on the rocks hundreds of years ago. Enchanted, Elizabeth went from rock to rock, touching, studying, asking questions. It was more than two hours before they returned to where West waited below. One glance at his granite face, and no one needed to wonder if he was angry.
The next day, when the caravan came upon one of
the many closed turquoise mines that dotted the rugged slopes of the Sacramentos, Elizabeth wanted to go inside and explore. West put his foot down.
“No, Mrs. Curtin,” he said calmly. “Out of the question. I won’t allow it.”
Aware of the building tension between the pair, the others held their collective breaths and turned to look at Elizabeth, wondering what she would do, hoping she would quietly acquiesce.
She didn’t.
Sick and tired of putting up with the dark disgruntled man who was forever spoiling everything for everybody, Elizabeth again challenged him.
She loosened the drawstrings of her flat-crowned hat, took it off, and hung it on the saddle horn. Looking straight at the scowling, mounted West, she tossed the reins to the ground, threw her leg over the saddle just the way she’d seen him do, and slid from the iron gray’s back.
Three sets of eyeballs clicked in unison as Edmund, Grady, and Taos all looked anxiously from Elizabeth to West.
West sighed.
Just as Elizabeth had done, he slowly removed his sweat-stained Stetson and hooked it on the horn. He released the sorrel mare’s reins, threw his long leg over, and dropped agilely to the ground.
Like a couple of gunfighters in a high-noon showdown on the dusty street of a frontier town, the pair started toward each other. The rest of the caravan, still mounted, watched in nervous silence.
Her chin lifted defiantly, shoulders thrown back, Elizabeth walked steadily forward to meet the dark, angry man purposely bearing down on her. The fateful march lasted but a few seconds; it seemed much longer. At last they stood toe to toe, facing each other, so close Elizabeth noticed a tiny muscle twitching at the corner of his stern mouth, and West saw the rapid throbbing of the pulse in her creamy throat.
Elizabeth swallowed hard.
Never had she seen a man look meaner than West Quarternight looked at that moment. She sensed him drawing in, coiling like a great spring. The muscles along his dark jaw became tense and rigid. His gray eyes were murderous.
Still, she was not to be bullied. She had opened her mouth to inform him she would “do any damned thing” she pleased, when he thoroughly shocked her by saying, barely above a whisper, “Don’t do it. Please don’t go in that old mine. It isn’t safe.”
For a fraction of a second his mean gray eyes lost their hardness, and she could have sworn she caught a fleeting glimpse of naked fear in their silver-gray depths. Flustered, she frowned at him, hesitated, but felt compelled to go on with the speech she had planned to make.
Hands on her hips, face tilted up to his, she said, “Quarternight, you can’t tell me what you will and will not allow me to do.” She watched his expressive gray eyes immediately flare with rage and was strangely relieved. She was back on safe ground now. Knew right where she stood. “I am going into that mine to have a look around. And you cannot stop me!”
She thought for a minute he was going to strike her. She knew he wanted to. Instead he turned and walked away and Elizabeth caught his almost imperceptible nod to Taos.
Minutes later when Elizabeth stepped into the shadowed mouth of the long-abandoned mine, she glanced over her shoulder to see West leaning negligently back against a shoulder-high boulder, arms crossed over his chest. There was about him that usual air of quiet defiance which she found both irritating and attractive. Apparently his concern for her safety had been short-lived. She tossed her head and hurried into the abandoned turquoise mine, Taos, Grady, and Edmund close behind.
When the last glimpse of her flaming red hair was swallowed up in the mine’s yawning darkness, West’s long arms came uncrossed. He pushed away from his rocky resting place, his body taut, his heart hammering in his chest.
He could feel the perspiration beading in his hairline and along his upper lip. He tried to take slow, calming breaths. It did no good. He felt weak, as if his legs would not support him. A bitter taste of fear filled his mouth, and he trembled violently.
In the blinding sunlight of the New Mexican wilderness, West’s recurring nightmare caught up with him again, this time while he was wide awake.
He was again a sickly, starving twenty-four-year-old Yankee prisoner locked up in that hellhole the South called Andersonville. With him was the best friend he had ever had in his life. Captain Darin Brooks and he had been together since the first days of the war, when they had both been strong and eager.
Now they were thin and disillusioned but determined they’d escape. They had to escape. They were going to die if they didn’t get out. It had taken weeks to dig the long tunnel under the prison floor. At last the night came when they were ready. All they had to do was crawl the length of the dark narrow tunnel in the middle of the night and freedom would be theirs.
They had almost made it. Liberty was within reach, when the tunnel began to collapse on top of them. Great clods of dirt fell into their eyes, their mouths, shutting off their breath. Suffocating them. Burying them alive.
Now West weakly crouched down on his heels in the glaring New Mexico sunshine. He leaned over and put his head between his legs, gasping for breath. He put his face in his hands, trembling and sweating. He felt sick. Sick that he had survived that night and Brooks had died. It was Brooks who’d had everything to live for. Brooks who had a wife and two baby boys waiting for him back in Ohio. Brooks who was too good to die young.
West stayed crouched there shaking in the heat, his fearful gray eyes riveted on the mine’s mouth. When at last he caught sight of flaming red hair flashing like a beacon in the night, he shot to his feet and a grin of relief spread over his dark face.
Quickly, West checked himself, wiped the smile off, leaned back against his rock upthrust, crossed his arms over his chest, and pretended nonchalance. He was confident that none of them suspected he was a man so afraid of mines and tunnels and caves and caverns, the prospect of going into one literally paralyzed him with terror.
What, he wondered miserably, what would he do if they actually located the vast underground caverns of the Legend?
37
“BY DOGGIES, WE BEEN on the trail ten days now since leaving Rancho Caballo and ain’t run into no trouble yet,” said Grady. He rode along beside West under a white New Mexico sun.
West, his alert gray eyes sweeping the serrated mountain peaks rising just off to the left, said, “Don’t go tempting fate.”
To which Grady quickly replied, “Well, what do you know? He can talk. I was beginnin’ to think you’d gone as mute as Taos.”
West managed a slight grin, but it was quickly gone. His face, covered with a ten-day growth of black woolly beard, again took on that shuttered, glowering expression Grady had come to dread.
Grady couldn’t help himself. He had to ask. “Why are you so all-fired mad at Elizabeth Curtin?”
“Who said I was?”
“It’s plain as the nose on your old sour puss. What in tarnation’s wrong? I’m a-gettin’ tired of askin’.”
“Then quit asking,” said West. He glanced at Grady, and added, “Nothing is wrong. Nada.”
But it wasn’t true. He was angry with Elizabeth. Everything she did rankled him, made him mad as hell. He longed for the moment when he safely deposited her at her husband’s feet and was done with her once and for all. She was what the Mexicans would call la bruja—the witch. Elizabeth Curtin was a tempting, flame-haired witch who was driving him nuts. Damn the beautiful bruja!
West pulled his thoughts back to the trail ahead. The caravan had managed to skirt the western edges of the towering Sacramentos, but there was no way around the Guadalupes, looming now against the clear blue sky. Already they were leaving the flat sagebrush and saltbush country behind, gradually climbing up into the foothills toward a series of rough ridges and unspoiled canyons.
“That’s it, ain’t it, Sonny?” said Grady abruptly, pointing to a big rocky talus rising just ahead. “That the entrance to the pass?”
“Yep,” said West, “right on the other side of that rippled slope w
e’ll turn up into the pass. Barring any unforeseen trouble, we should be through the mountains and on the other side by four or five this afternoon.”
“I ’spect so,” said Grady. “You ’member, Sonny, that time we was a-ridin’ through the pass and them two ’Paches was hid up there on some high rocks and they jumped us when we …”
Nodding, West remembered. He was not worried about Apaches today, but he was edgy. He felt as if somebody was walking over his grave. Couldn’t shake the nagging premonition that something was going to happen.
He said nothing about it to Grady. But he did resolve to be extra alert and cautious as he led the contingent through the crisscrossing maze of peaks, spires, and craters in the inner reaches of the towering Guadalupes.
Immediately he blamed his mild case of jitters on Elizabeth Curtin. If she hadn’t insisted on coming along on a perilous journey meant only for men, he wouldn’t be feeling apprehensive. He could damned sure take care of himself. So could the others. Even Edmund Curtin had toughened considerably since leaving Santa Fe.
West glanced back over his shoulder. Edmund, who rode several yards back alongside one of the vaqueros, was no longer the fancy-garbed tinhorn who had ridden out of Santa Fe that May dawn. Gone was the fringed suede jacket, the leather cowboy cuffs, the stiff denim trousers, the bright red shirt, the bolo tie, and even the wide intaglioed belt with the big silver buckle.
Edmund now wore a sun-faded pullover collarless shirt and a pair of soft buckskins beneath his protective batwing chaps. His felt hat was creased and sweat-stained. His brown leather boots were scarred and the worn heels sported a pair of big roweled Mexican spurs. Slouched in the saddle, hat brim pulled low, Edmund Curtin looked completely at home astride the Navajo pony. The urbane Easterner had adapted. He no longer needed anyone watching after him. Edmund Curtin, West suspected, wouldn’t be afraid to go down into a deep, dark cavern.
“Where the hell you goin’?” Grady’s raspy voice cut into West’s troubled musings.
Stopping abruptly, West realized he had ridden past the distinctive sandstone landmark denoting the opening of the mountain pass. Grady pulled up and jerked the bit against his mount’s mouth. His horse danced in place and shook its head.
